Here's how it works: a law firm drums up business, signing on copyright holders—mostly movie producers—as clients. The clients are charged nothing, instead getting a percentage of whatever revenue the law firm can collect by going after those sharing the film online.

The law firm hires a P2P detection company—which are also multiplying like especially fertile rabbits—to troll P2P networks, looking for people sharing the works in question. The detection company passes a list of IP addresses back to the law firm, which then goes to court and files a "Doe" lawsuit against the unknown infringers. The court then grants a subpoena that forces Internet providers to convert the IP addresses to names and physical locations. Once the lawyers have addresses in hand, it's just a matter of mailing out letters to the accused, asking them to pay up or risk massive statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement in court. In the UK, 15-20 percent of people pay up without a fight.

If done at scale, this has the potential to be a lucrative gig. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) showed us the way, but they never made money suing people—and indeed "only" managed to file against 18,000 people in five years.

By contrast, the new breed of entrepreneurial lawyers got started in early 2010. Together, they have managed to handily eclipse the RIAA's 18,000 lawsuits in the space of nine months. It's not just the US Copyright Group, best known of the lot; over the summer, several new lawyers have anted up for a spot in the game, even if they specialize in family law and divorce settlements. With this much money at stake—US Copyright Group often asks for $1,500 or more—it's not hard to see why lawyers might want a spot at the poker table.

We've looked through federal court dockets across the US to find out just how far the practice has spread, and we turned up five groups currently filing multiple Doe cases against file-swappers. Here they are.

US Copyright Group, Virginia

A creation of the Virginia law firm Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, USCG is now the aging grandpa of the settlement letter business in the US, having started all the way back in January. Over the course of this year, the firm has filed Doe lawsuits against more than 16,000 file-swappers. It defends mostly small-time films, and hasn't (yet) ventured into the world of transsexual pornography (other lawyers, as readers will see below, have done so).

USCG has attracted national attention with its campaign, in part because it has represented a couple of films that people have actually heard of: Far Cry and The Hurt Locker. We have covered its campaign extensively, and as the most prominent of the settlement letter firms, it has attracted the attention and opposition of groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And, err, the kind of people who send bomb threats.

Media Copyright Group, Illinois/Minnesota

Man of Steele

Chicago lawyer John Steele specializes in family law: child support, divorce, prenuptial agreements, domestic violence. His phone number, 1-800-DIVORCE, basically sums it up. "I have always been considered a 'family man,'" he says on his website. "Ever since I was young, my parents instilled strong family values in me. They helped me realize how important family is to one’s happiness and balance in life."

But in September, the family man got into a new and totally unrelated business. He began filing court documents in Chicago's federal court on behalf of pornographers who pump out films like—we are not kidding—Meat My Ass. One of his clients, he says in a court filing, "is a leading producer and distributor of adult entertainment content within the transsexual niche."

He started small, with 100 Does on September 2. On September 29, he filed three new cases on 300, 500, and 300 Does, for a total of 1,200 targets.

The IP addresses come from the Media Copyright Group, a company we found registered in Minnesota to one Paul Hansmeier. The company has only been in business since June 21. Hansmeier also works for the Alpha Law Firm, which is located at the same address as Media Copyright Group in downtown Minneapolis.

Media Copyright Group appears to be coordinating the entire process; their website explains that they do tracking, legal identification, and damages collection. "All aspects of our anti-piracy solution are paid out of the damages that are collected for you," says the company. "At no point in our process will you be asked to write a check to us. Ideally, the damages that are collected for you will compensate you for the losses you suffer on a daily basis from individuals who elect to pirate, instead of purchase, your content."

They know their work is unpopular, and that the RIAA was pilloried for its legal campaign. "What many critics seemingly fail to adequately appreciate is the capital investment, time, effort and risk that goes into media production. It should be a truism to say that without paying customers the media production industry will collapse, but it seems as if this obvious fact has been overlooked in the ongoing debate about P2P piracy. Moreover, most tend to gloss over the moral culpability of those who make the decision to steal content instead of purchasing or refraining from consuming it. Our values are aligned with content producers."

IO Group, California

The IO Group, also known as Titan Media, produces films like Joe Gage Sex Files vol. 2 and has recently entered the "Doe" lawsuit arena. The company appears to do its own detection and legal work in-house, and it files in California against smaller numbers of alleged infringers.

On September 28, the company filed five separate Doe lawsuits against 65, 34, 138, 50, and 9 Doe defendants. The money collected, presumably, will be used to fund volume three of Joe Gage's sexcapades.

Adult Copyright Company, West Virginia

West Virginia's federal court doesn't see many copyright cases. In fact, the new P2P lawsuits appear to be the first copyright cases in West Virginia since 2008, when the recording industry brought a few cases against individuals in the state.

Who is the Adult Copyright Company? It's Kenneth Ford, a West Virginia lawyer who understands the hard times the porn industry has suffered. "There is an entire generation of viewers who think that it is perfectly acceptable to steal adult content," he site says. "It's time to make people pay for the content they steal."

The content that people are stealing includes Juicy White Anal Booty 4 (118 Does) and Relax, He's My Stepdad 2 (245 Does), and Ford has filed some pretty impressive numbers; his seven cases have targeted 5,469 file-swappers in a mere matter of weeks.

Copyright Defense Agency, Texas

Finally, down in the Lone Star State, lawyer Evan Stone has launched a similar service. In July and August, he filed two suits on behalf of gay porn producer Lucas, suits which together targeted a mere 118 people.

On August 27, Stone stepped up his game, filing a single suit against 113 Does on behalf of VCX Ltd. A month later, on September 21, he upped his numbers again, this time going after 670 Does for sharing the German porn film Der Gute Onkel (we're guessing that the Onkle turns out not to be so gute in the film).

Stone appears to work with a Texas P2P detection operation called Copyright Defense Agency, which promises a turnkey solution including detection and litigation. This is the operation which told a court in one of the Lucas cases that employee Eric Green gathers P2P information by recording "what I observed both as plain text in a spreadsheet and through a series of screenshots executed through the Windows Operating System."

So many lawsuits, so little time

If you weren't keeping score at home, that's about 24,000 Doe lawsuits filed between January and October of this year alone. Notably, none of them are based on music of any kind, nor do they concern video games or major studio motion pictures. A few independent filmmakers have decided that this is the way to go, but the new players in this game are all about the pornography.

Given that most of the new entrants only began filing cases late this summer, we expect many more lawyers to get in the game before the year is out. Watching US Copyright Group send out all those $1,500+ settlement letters has proved irresistible—and with no one in Congress standing up to publicly denounce the tactics (and the amounts) involved, the number of cases will surely continue to grow.

While the tactics here are deeply unattractive, file-swappers could also make such cases vanish if they just stopped sharing Juicy White Anal Booty 4 in the first place—but that's probably too much to ask.